After several months of back-and-forth, the Senate and House of Representatives agreed on a consensus version of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) on July 23. FIRRMA reforms the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) process currently used to evaluate and address national security-related concerns related to foreign investment into the United States.

The joint House and Senate conference committee for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2019 has agreed upon and released a reconciled version of the bill. Both the reconciled statutory text and accompanying joint explanatory statement are posted below:

Despite the substantial overlap between counterterrorism activities undertaken by the CIA and JSOC, we tend to pay a lot more attention to the details of the congressional oversight framework for the former as compared to the latter. The NDAA often addresses CT oversight relating to DOD activities, however, and this year is no exception. What follows below is an attempt to provide a user-friendly guide to the proposals on the table.

Both Jack Goldsmith and Harold Koh have recently written about the constitutionality of congressional restrictions on the transfer of prisoners. The President’s veto last week of the NDAA was based in part on his objection to the restrictions it places on such transfers.

A little-noticed provision of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 might expand Congressional oversight of kill/capture operations conducted by the U.S. military. The change arguably reflects the ongoing process whereby U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is coming to resemble our involvement in Yemen and Somalia (and we now might add Libya), and constitutes the latest development in the long-running process whereby we are evolving a legal architecture for kinetic operations in situations that are not obviously full-fledged combat operations.